A Barrette & A Lighter
by thetwofacedgirl
Summary: Growing up isn't an easy thing to do. Especially not for Adam.


Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess.

Scratch that – there was an awkward, insecure princess.

No, that doesn't sound right… There was a girl.

No, just forget all of that. This isn't even a fairytale.

That I know of, at least.

When I was born, I was like a miracle to my parents. To my mother, at least, my father wasn't really interested in my life. They got divorced after a while, and she met a new man, who had a son of his own. We hit it off instantly, becoming best friends, and our parents thought it was so cute to see us bonding like that.

I mean, my mother knew that I wouldn't be playing tea party and Barbies with my new brother, Andrew, but when I entered preschool, she was pretty annoyed to find out that I still wasn't playing tea party and Barbies with anyone.

"Don't worry, Mrs. Torres, Gracie is just going through a phase, I'm sure," my teacher assured her one day when she came to pick me up.

But not even my teacher was sure of that when she would find me on the boy's side after telling us to line up. I would reluctantly walk back to the girl's side and look at all of the females surrounding me.

It didn't feel right. Being lumped in with all of the girls did.

They were all pretty and lugged around their dolls and wore skirts and dresses.

I wasn't pretty and I didn't like dolls and I looked awkward in skirts and dresses.

I liked getting dirty, playing with toy trucks and playing sports.

My mom set me up on some play dates with the neighbor's daughters, but their ideas of fun were quite different from what I had in mind. I didn't want to play dress up and mess around in my mother's makeup. They would end up being picked up early from our house, and my mother would be disappointed while I just went and played with Andrew instead.

When she hired Andrew and I a babysitter, it was the first time I'd ever really looked at a girl who wasn't around my age and playing with dolls.

Her name was Michelle and she was tall and blonde and beautiful. Andrew and I would always fight for her attention. It wasn't until Andrew set me straight that I realized that maybe my feelings for Michelle weren't right. Girls were supposed to like boys, and boys were supposed to like girls.

I still remember that conversation very well.

"Andrew, why can't I be a boy?"

"You just can't. You're a girl."

When I went to middle school, I actually started to listen to him. I decided it was time for me to try and be a girl. Maybe I really did have a 'tomboy' phase, and maybe I would like it. I had my Mom pick out some clothes for me. I had very long hair done up with a barrette, and she helped me apply makeup. She always told me how beautiful I looked, but I didn't feel very pretty. It just didn't feel right.

Apparently, many of the boys at my school felt the same way as my mother, always 'checking me out', but when they weren't looking, I would be 'checking out' the other girls with them too. I was asked out by a couple of these boys, and after feeling so much pressure to be in a relationship, I finally said yes to one of them. After only one day, I felt like it wasn't going to work out and dumped him. I didn't want to be in a relationship with a guy, it just didn't feel right.

That night I went home to not find my parents there.

Perfect.

I threw out all the clothes and makeup my Mom bought me, and I took a pair of kitchen scissors and chopped all my hair off. I went into Andrew's bedroom and snatched some of his baggy clothes, threw them on, and went back to the bathroom to admire myself.

And finally, I felt right. I felt complete.

This was who I was supposed to be.

Clearly, my mother was not too happy. She told me I was a girl, and I was supposed to be girly. She found the trash bag with my things in it, and told me to go put all of it away upstairs, and she would fix my hair later.

I locked myself in my room and that definitely wasn't the first time I had cried my eyes out over this sort of thing. She just didn't understand. I wasn't supposed to be a girl. I wasn't supposed to be girly.

I wasn't supposed to be a girl.

I shoved the bag under my bed, never to be seen again, and as I was doing so, one object fell out.

The barrette that she'd put in my hair.

I picked it up and wandered back into the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror one more time, with short hair, no makeup, Andrew's clothing. I finally could admire my reflection and not feel insecure about it.

And my Mom just had to go and ruin that for me.

I fastened the barrette into my hair, and this time, I just saw a girl staring back at me, looking pathetic. I wanted to punch the mirror. I couldn't take this anymore, not liking what I saw. I felt like an animal trapped in a cage. I didn't want these feminine facial features or those repulsive lumps on my chest.

I didn't want this body, this skin.

Skin – something you could just tear through so easily.

If only it was that easy to change my skin completely.

I looked down around the sink in front of me and noticed a discarded lighter.

What was that doing there?

But I was quite unlucky to find it there at that moment, because without a second thought, I yanked off my barrette, lit it, and pressed it to my skin. It felt terrible, but so, so good. I threw the barrette back down in a second, knowing that it wasn't something I should be doing. It was a spur of the moment type thing.

But later, when I went down to dinner, I had to throw on a hoodie to cover the scars on my wrists – there were at least five on each one. Maybe more. I didn't count. I just let the pain sink in. If it was all I felt mentally, I should just feel it physically.

The next day, I went to school wearing my plain jeans and the hoodie I'd worn to dinner just the previous day. My barrette was in my hair; my lighter was in my pocket. When people saw the way I looked now, they just called me a 'dyke' and a 'lesbian'. It really hurt the more I thought about it, the more I thought I didn't want to be called that. I didn't want to like girls as much as I did.

But did I really?

I thought back to preschool, when my teacher would tell my Mom it was just a phase.

Maybe this would all blow over soon.

But as the days went on, I felt myself slipping into depression.

The name-calling and the fact that nobody would talk to me unless they were making fun of me didn't help. After school, I would just wander up to my room with my newfound obsession in burning myself, and that would be that.

Summer was a great relief, about two months without those terrible people harassing me constantly. But that didn't mean that every time I saw myself, my own thoughts would be the ones harassing me.

My mother was oblivious to the reason that I was so upset all the time. Hell, she was probably oblivious to the fact that I was constantly upset. Andrew tried to cheer me up sometimes, but he didn't understand what it was like. Nothing would cheer me up at this rate.

Grade seven rolled around way too soon. My grades were slipping, and as usual, nobody would talk to me.

But that one day at lunch, I was sitting on my own as usual, until a small girl walked over and sat by me. I figured this was some sort of dare, and I didn't speak to her.

"Your name is Gracie, right?"

Yeah, isn't it disgusting?

"Yes." I responded sharply.

I still remember exactly what she said – "Pretty name for a pretty girl."

I just looked up at her to see a huge smile spread across her face. This had to be a dare.

I'd never even seen this girl before, had I? Maybe she was in one of my classes, but I'd never talked to her before. She herself was quite pretty, though.

She had wavy, chest-length light brown hair, and naturally arched eyebrows. Her nose was somewhat long and pointy and she had very pale skin with a tiny beauty mark right underneath her full lips. Her most captivating feature was her dark blue eyes encircled with light purple eyeshadow and heavy mascara.

She introduced herself as Megan, and didn't shut up for the rest of the lunch period. I mean, she let me have my say sometimes too, but I didn't have much to say. Well, it wasn't that I didn't have much to say – it was that I was so overwhelmed with the knowledge that somebody was actually speaking to me. I actually really liked this girl; she was quite funny and nice.

We sat together for the next couple of days too. And she was in my science class and English class – we worked together on various projects. My mother was quite happy to see me finally hanging out with a girl my age. I was quite happy to finally be hanging out with a girl my age – or somebody in general, at least.

The two of us always had so much fun together. We had our own secret handshake, and a hideout where we would just go and forget the world. We would talk about anything and everything, but one subject that I noticed never came up between the two of us was the future. We never knew what kind of jobs each other wanted, or if we ever wanted to get married and have kids. We never talked about boys and relationships either, on that subject.

The first time I'd ever really realized this was one time when I went over to her house to sleepover. It was the last day of summer, and Megan had just come back from some sort of camp that she'd been at, so I was very excited to see her after so long.

It wasn't right for me to like girls, but ever since that meeting with this one, I realized that I just wasn't right.

This sleepover had just put all the pieces together.

One second, we're just in her room, talking about everything, as usual.

"So, how was your summer?"

I regretted asking that question quite quickly, because Megan was telling me about how great it was, and I was very happy for her – until she mentioned that she met a boy.

"W-What's his name?"

"It's Kyle. He's really nice and funny and blah, blah…"

I wasn't paying attention. I was just tuning in and out. This was unreal. I'd had crushes, but, this wasn't like a crush to me.

I'd never felt this way about a person before.

I'd never felt this way about her before.

Every second I heard Megan say something, I felt like I could say the same things about her, and that's what really scared me the most. To think that maybe, she felt the same way I felt about her, about this Kyle boy.

I'm not sure what scared me more – the fact she felt that way about him, or the fact I felt that way about her.

And there she was, rambling on and on, and I went back to that moment in the sixth grade when I began burning myself.

Spur of the moment type thing.

And the next thing I know, my lips were connected to hers.

And I went back to that moment in the sixth grade when I was staring at myself in the mirror, with short hair and Drew's clothing.

Everything felt perfect, and right.

Until I pulled away, because I realized what I was doing was wrong. She was in a relationship, and she didn't even like girls, or me, in that way.

"I… I'm sorry… I don't…"

"It's okay."

And with that… She pulled me back in for another kiss.

We didn't really talk about that one night, until we were alone again, and she told me that she'd broken up with Kyle. When I asked her why, she told me that it was because she'd much rather be with me instead. And so, we were. She was my first girlfriend. But when we went off to separate high schools, that happiness I felt was gone.

We still could talk, right? Wrong. Her parents had decided that she would be moving away.

We IMed every once and a while, but it didn't feel the same as having her there to talk to, to tell everything, to hold, to kiss, and so on.

This was when I started burning myself again, and it was a couple days into the summer where I had felt it was right to chop off all of my ugly hair again. I felt that same rush, and I threw on Andrew's clothes again, and this time, I went downstairs to face my parents.

They weren't home, but Andrew was.

"Gracie, what are you…?"

"I have something to tell you," I stated, as I sat down beside him on the couch.

And I told him. It just came spilling out of my mouth. I had never been more certain about any three words I'd ever said in my life.

"I'm a boy."

I talked it over with him for a moment, coming to a conclusion that I was transgendered. I was positive of it. Andrew supported me from the first second. He told me he was sorry for anything he'd ever said that had discouraged me from finding my true self, and he was going to help me come out to our parents.

He even helped me think of the perfect name.

Adam.

Adam Torres.

It just sounded right.

But when I had admitted that to my parents, they didn't seem to agree. And as usual – you guessed it – especially my mother. She was clearly very ashamed to have a child like that, and didn't talk to me for about a week. Every time it was dinner, even though we usually sat around the table together like a family, I ran upstairs and hid in my room.

I didn't feel like part of the family.

How did something so great go to this?

But one day, Andrew came upstairs to get me, and he brought me downstairs to sit with the rest of the family. My mother told me that she was sorry and she would try to be more accepting towards the person that I really was. I looked at Andrew and just knew that this was his doing.

Everything just came together when I finally bought my first ace bandage for my chest. I still felt like a looked a little feminine, so I threw a beanie over my hair every morning and was good to go.

My barrette and lighter were put away for a very long time – especially after I started going to school and being called 'him', 'he', 'Adam'.

The teachers all knew about my 'condition', yet treated me as a boy, and everyone else didn't know.

In ninth grade, I met another girl, who somewhat reminded me of Megan.

This girl was named Nicole, and we started up a relationship in no time, this one I felt sure about.

However, Nicole was rather… Let's say, experienced. It hadn't been too long in our relationship before she wanted to 'go further' with me, but all we'd ever done was kiss, besides the one or two make out sessions we'd had, but they'd never led up to anything. I told her I wasn't quite ready for that sort of thing, and she thought it was cute at first. But after a while, she was calling me immature and saying I needed to 'man up'.

If there was one thing I didn't like hearing, it was being told to 'man up'.

I don't know what was going through my mind, but one day, we were at her house, making out. I was scared of this going further – at this point she still believed that I didn't want to go far, but being her, she'd still try to urge me on.

And that's when it happened.

"Adam… What… What's…?"

She'd pulled open my shirt before I'd even said anything. She saw my bandage, my girlish physique hiding underneath it. It didn't take her long to put two and two together. "You're a girl! You're… You're sickening! You freak!"

And I was kicked out, never to be seen again.

I didn't want to show my face at school the next day, but it was never really easy for me to fake sick. I realized that gossip really did spread fast, as I walked down the hallways, trying to avoid the incriminating stares, the comments that flew around as I passed people. I waltzed up to my locker and burst it open, only to find tampons come pouring out directly into my face. The sound of high-fiving and laughter only followed from behind me.

And following that… Abuse. Verbal, physical, whatever it was. I would come home with black eyes and bruises all over my bodies, only adding to them once I'd managed to dig up my oh-so-loved barrette and lighter. Andrew tried to help, but he just got called the 'freak's' brother. I told him I didn't needed protection, but we both knew deep inside that I did.

I mean, I was a man. Not a manly man. But I could at least try to protect myself. Clearly, that wasn't working out for me.

The following year, I found myself at a brand new school – Degrassi.

I befriended Clare, Sav and Eli, trying to fit in as hard as I could. More so than usual – people were buying the fact that I was a boy so far. I felt a bit awkward trying to play it up by making crude comments towards girls, but I didn't want this school to end up like my last.

Unfortunately, it did. The Nicole incident played out again with a girl named Bianca, and I didn't think I'd ever find myself a nice group of friends who would ever accept me.

Once I came out to Clare and Eli, they accepted me quite easily, and it came as such a shock. They were there for me one hundred percent, just like Andrew was. I even found myself a nice girlfriend, Fiona, after a while, and things couldn't be any more perfect than it was.

And I guess this 'fairy tale' had a happy ending.

For now, at least.

**A/N: I hope you liked it! This clearly isn't my best piece of work, but I've been having a lot of writer's block when it comes to writing the next chapter of 'Light A Fire', even if I know what I want to happen, so I just thought I'd write something to try and help with it, and I've been wanting to write something like this for a while. I hope you guys like it, and I might even write a continuation to it... Thoughts? Anyway, thanks for wasting your time on my work! Haha. **


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